​While reading around the topic of glottalization, I looked at the Wikipedia article on Yorkshire Dialect. For those not familiar with the Yorkshire accent, I should explain that there is a special type of assimilation, called Yorkshire Assimilation by John Wells, which results in a final voiced consonant becoming devoiced when followed by a voiceless consonant. Thus the /d/ at the end of ‘wide’ /waɪd/ becomes /t/ in ‘wide trousers’ as a result of the initial /t/ in the second word; as a result, in most of West Yorkshire you can’t hear a difference between ‘wide trousers’ and ‘white trousers’. Soon after moving to Yorkshire, I got a surprise when I heard a local man in a café in Bridlington order a crab sandwich. It sometimes sounds as if a final voiced plosive becomes either a glottal stop or a glottalized consonant, though I’m not sure about that. I’m pretty sure this process doesn’t apply in the case of final voiced fricatives, but occasionally I think I hear an example in an environment like ‘raise cash’, giving /reɪs kæʃ/.

In the WP article the description of this phenomenon is very brief, and refers only to Malcolm Petyt’s study and not to the Wells Accents of English (pp 366-7). It also cites as an example /æpsəluːtli/ for ‘absolutely’, which though certainly accurate doesn’t sound particularly Yorkshire to me.

Yesterday we went to see the disappointing film of Alan Bennett’s ‘The Lady in the Van’. The character of Bennett’s mother has a go at a West Yorkshire accent, but gets it wrong when she says ‘She smells like a bad dishcloth’ and pronounces ‘bad’ as /bæt/. This doesn’t fit the rule, of course. ‘Bad tea-towel’ would have been appropriate for pronouncing ‘bad’ as /bæt/.

One of the reasons that /apsəlutli/ doesnt sound particularly Yorkshire to you, Peter, is prob'ly because it's a fairly common General British form. The decade-long collections of data on BBC newsreaders I made in the preparations for my 1972 Concise Pronouncing Dictionary showed enough occurrences for me to feel justified in including /aps-/ variants in it for a number of very common words.

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Ed

3/28/2016 09:31:30 pm

There was an article published on this subject in the 2016 Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society. Its main conclusion was that John Wells exaggerated the prevalence of Yorkshire assimilation by saying that "it seems to be virtually categorical as a phonological rule of connected speech". This study was based on 14 long-term residents of the Bradford area. In addition to modern empirical research, the author (Tim J. Zee) quoted parts of Joseph Wright, which showed the assimilation process in some phrases but not others.

I ought to admit that it was I who wrote most of the phonetic parts of the current article on Yorkshire dialect, including the one that you've highlighted. I had Wells to hand, but I felt that a first-hand account of dialect research was preferable when available. Given Wells's disclaimer at the start of "Accents of English", I imagine that he would probably defer to Petyt on the subject.

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Ed

3/28/2016 09:35:38 pm

Mistake above: it was actually the 2015 Transactions, but it arrived in 2016.

In addition, Yorkshire assimilation does occur for fricatives too. Zee gives some examples on page 37, such as "clothes post", "is sound" and "as she".

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Peter Roach

3/29/2016 08:31:31 am

Thanks for this interesting information

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David Marjanović

1/6/2018 01:54:28 pm

"The character of Bennett’s mother has a go at a West Yorkshire accent, but gets it wrong when she says ‘She smells like a bad dishcloth’ and pronounces ‘bad’ as /bæt/. This doesn’t fit the rule, of course."

Do initial lenis plosives actually count as voiced for the purpose of the rule? Or perhaps the expected [dː] devoices automatically, as long voiced consonants tend to do?

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Peter

1/6/2018 02:08:22 pm

Hi, I think perhaps you are asking about *final* lenis plosives? When the assimilation described here takes place it is accompanied by pre-fortis shortening, in my experience. Whether it is voiced or not, the consonant is preceded by a short (typical of pre-fortis position) allophone of the vowel. So /a/ in 'bad' will be shorter in 'bad taste' than in 'bad deed'.
I take the point that I could have expressed the rule in terms of fortis and lenis, rather than voiceless and voiced.